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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
This week should mark my second anniversary, but my wife died in the Sept. 11 attacks. When will the Bush administration tell the truth about what happened?
Aug 14, 2003 | I should be celebrating my second anniversary this week. Instead, my marriage lasted exactly one month. My wife, Sara Elizabeth Manley, was killed on Sept. 11, 2001, in the 93rd-floor offices of Fred Alger Management in 1 World Trade Center. She was 31. We were married on Aug. 11, just a month before.
I was stepping out of a taxi while on a business trip in my hometown of Washington when I heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Hurrying into the hotel in search of a television, I wondered, "How could anyone be so stupid as to hit the World Trade Center?"
Expecting to see the twisted wreckage of a wayward Cessna, I instead saw a gaping hole in the side of the building and the dark smoke that was billowing from it. My heart sank. The hole on the northern façade of 1 WTC was very close to Sara's office. The second plane hit while I stared at the television, and all mystery about the catastrophe departed with the plane's arrival; I knew at that moment that the country was under attack.
I turned on my cellphone to call Sara, ignoring the voice mail messages that were already piling up. No answer -- then a fast busy signal. I redialed repeatedly, with the same result. I called my voice mail. Nothing from Sara, only concerned friends and family.
It wasn't long before my father and I were driving toward New York, listening to false reports that a bomb had been detonated at the State Department. From the height of Wisconsin Avenue, near the National Cathedral, I could see the smoke from the Pentagon rising above the city.
It struck me then that it was like a scenario from Tom Clancy's novel "Debt of Honor." In the book, terrorists crash a commercial airliner into the Capitol during a presidential address to Congress. In the book, hundreds if not thousands of people, including the fictional president of the United States, are killed.
The radio jogged my wandering mind back to reality with news that one of the Twin Towers had fallen. I furiously called and emailed friends and colleagues in New York in an attempt to find out which tower it was. It would be the last time I would give any thought to Tom Clancy until the next year.
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"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center," National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told reporters in May 2002, "...and that they would try to use an airplane as a missile." While only Rice knows her intention in making this statement, the rest of us now know it to be utterly false.Let's forget about Tom Clancy for now. Even without using a novelist's imagination, the United States had plenty of information that could have led to the conclusion that terrorists "would try to use an airplane as a missile" -- precisely what Rice denied -- and it should have been preparing for the possibility. Government leaders had known of terrorists' intentions to use airplanes as missiles for at least seven years before Sept. 11. In 1994, French commandos stormed a hijacked aircraft while it sat on an airport tarmac awaiting refueling, preventing the Algerian hijackers onboard from flying the plane into the Eiffel Tower. Dubbed "the Marseilles plot" because of the location of the commandos' successful action, the details of this terrorist operation were well known to international intelligence agencies. The 1995 "Bojinka plot," in which terrorists planned to hijack 12 planes as they flew over the Pacific Ocean and crash them into high-profile American targets, was also known in the American intelligence community long before Sept. 11.
This June, citing a report in the Christian Science Monitor, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern wrote in the Miami Herald: "In the weeks before Sept. 11, Jordanian intelligence had warned U.S. counterparts that bin Laden terrorists were planning a major attack using aircraft inside the continental United States. The Jordanians had intercepted a crucial al Qaeda message that dubbed the operation 'the big wedding.'"
Even more damning for Bush administration's claims of ignorance about the chance that terrorists would use planes as weapons is the following exchange, which seems to expose the administration's pre-Sept. 11 knowledge about reputed "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui. The Monitor and the Washington Post both reported that upon learning of the attacks during breakfast that awful day, CIA director George Tenet told former Sen. David Boren, "This has bin Laden all over it ... I wonder if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training."
